Pepsiman
- Brand
- Pepsi
- Year
- 1999
- Objective
- Awareness
- Industry
- Food & Drink
- Mechanic
- Arcade & Action
- Platform
- In-Game
- Agency
- KID
- Added
- October 2026
- 1
The player starts the disc on a title screen presented entirely in English with Japanese subtitles for dialogue, opening on an intro cutscene that frames the hero's mission: delivering Pepsi to people collapsing from thirst.
- 2
Each stage is an autorunner: Pepsiman runs forward on his own while the player reacts in real time, using dodges left and right, a dash, a brake, a slide, and jumps (including running jumps over long gaps) to get through traffic, pedestrians, construction equipment, runaway Pepsi trucks, barrels, oil tanks, and giant bottle caps, each hit triggering a slapstick pain animation and draining health.
- 3
The player tracks a shrinking, blinking Pepsi-logo health meter, a stage timer, and a running tally of collected Pepsi cans, with cans awarding points, restoring health every ten collected, and converting into extra lives at the end of a stage; floating balloons serve as checkpoints that respawn the player if too much damage is taken.
- 4
The signature action has the player thrust out an arm to hand a can of Pepsi to a thirst-stricken bystander along the route, which can run through streets, construction sites, and straight through the interiors of buildings and homes.
- 5
Performance is scored by a time limit and a par time per stage, so taking damage costs both health and seconds, pushing the player toward a clean, hitless run rather than just survival.
- 6
Most stages add a one-off gimmick scene that changes the controls or viewpoint: a steel trash can trapped on the torso that reverses left and right, a skateboard-steering segment down San Francisco's hills past cable cars, deadly one-hit obstacles that must be avoided perfectly, and a reversed-camera chase stage where the hero flees an oncoming threat with obstacles hidden until the last moment, rewarding memorized routes.
- 7
Between stages, the player watches a live-action interstitial of an American viewer eating snacks and drinking Pepsi while egging the player on, before reaching a final stage set in the fictional Pepsi City to resolve the overheating factory computer cutting off the supply.
- 8
Clearing the game unlocks stage select and the classic red Pepsiman as a playable skin, with a transparent "invisible" model and a wireframe model reserved for players who collect every can and beat every par time.
Objective
Pepsi's Japanese arm was fighting for scraps: in 1996 Pepsi held just 3% of Japan's soft-drink sales against Coca-Cola's 31%, with half the country's vending machines stocked by Coke. Tasked with winning over a market where "cola" was culturally synonymous with Coca-Cola, the brand built an entire superhero around the product itself — Pepsiman, an anthropomorphic can-man — betting that if the mascot caught on, the drink would follow. The PlayStation game extended that bet, putting Pepsiman in players' hands for a paid, voluntary stretch of brand time rather than another ad spot.
Solution
You play as Pepsiman sprinting through a city street that never stops moving — the game runs itself forward, and all you do is react: swerve left or right around traffic, slide under obstacles, jump gaps, and time a running leap over anything in your path. Pepsi cans are scattered along the route, a hundred per scene, and scooping them up is the only scoring that matters; your health is shown as a shrinking, blinking Pepsi logo that drains if you clip a Pepsi delivery truck or crash into a wall of runaway bottles. Each of the four stages — San Francisco, New York, Texas, and the fictional Pepsi City — is split into three scenes, and clearing all three sends you into a short live-action cutscene of a stereotypical American eating pizza and chips, washing it down with Pepsi, before dropping you into the next stage. A run ends either when your logo empties out or when you make it through all twelve scenes to the finish.
Can you still play it?
Pepsiman was never released outside Japan and has not been officially re-released on PlayStation Store, Steam, or Switch, so there's no legal way to buy it today. You can still play it from an original 1999 PlayStation disc, or try Pepsiman Recompiled, an unofficial fan-made browser port that requires you to supply your own disc files. The Pepsiman advertising character himself was retired by Pepsi in 2003, after running since 1996.
